by Jo Piazza
Nick does the so-called manly things too, changing tires and building things. The last time I’d been out of town he’d built me two new bookshelves and erected a hummingbird platform outside of our bedroom window so I could watch the birds eat their breakfast when I woke up in the morning. We both pay bills and take the car to be serviced and go grocery shopping. If one of us cooks, the other does the dishes. It’s just the way things are with us. I knew this was a good thing, a really good thing. It can even lead to a better sex life. According to a 2016 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family, heterosexual couples who split up the housework equally said they had more sex than couples who didn’t share chores. “When couples share similar tasks rather than different, gender-stereotyped ones, this seems to deepen desire,” the study claimed.
But I was warned by friends and marriage experts alike that all of this could change once we had kids. Another study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology followed 218 couples over eight years and found the vast majority were less happy with their marriages after becoming parents. Only 15 percent of fathers and 7 percent of mothers were more satisfied with their marriage after having a child.
In the past five years more and more married friends have told me they’ve decided to forgo children altogether. Many of them proudly announced, “We’re child free by choice!!!” Others were more subtle about it.
“Neither of us ever wanted kids. We like them in theory, but we like our dogs more. We want to travel and have nice things and keep our hard-earned money instead of paying for college,” our friend Jess explained.
The choice was more complicated for the Megs, two of my closest and oldest friends, the beloved gifters of sensible Patagonia hiking underwear.
“Lesbians are lucky that getting pregnant doesn’t happen without a miracle of modern science and financing, so we have to be very sure we want them before we do it,” Little Meg said to me. Together both Megs talked about having kids for years before deciding that it wasn’t right for them. They’re fantastic aunties to a dozen kids by now and they spoil them rotten, but they also fly off to the wine country at a moment’s notice without worrying about much more than where to board their aging pug, Turbo.
“Be conscious. Don’t just do things because they are the next step,” Big Meg said. “Really talk about it. Know what you’re getting into.”
Visiting Sweden was part of learning what we were getting into, figuring out if we could find an archetype for parenting that would keep our marriage in a good place.
As I learned in the coed, naked sauna, there are few better models for equality between parents than Sweden. The Scandinavian birthplace of the BabyBjörn, IKEA, and ABBA has been dubbed the “Land of the Stay-at-Home-Dad” due to its government-funded parental leave policies, which are so generous they should make the American government feel ashamed.
Swedish “dad leave” has enjoyed a highly publicized and colorful history. In 1974, when the country became the first in the world to introduce federally funded paid paternity leave, the government began running an incredibly effective ad campaign starring the beefy heavyweight wrestling star Lennart “Hoa-Hoa” Dahlgren posing with an equally beefy baby in his arms. It would be the equivalent of one of our NFL football players taking off a season to change diapers and then posing in commercials for Pampers. In 2009 twenty-six-year-old economics student and new dad Ragnar Bengtsson may have taken things too far when he attempted to breast-feed, saying that it “could prove very important for men’s ability to get much closer to their children at an early stage.” After months of trying to pump his nipples, Bengtsson proved unable to produce a biological miracle. Today most Swedish men opt for the easier path of sharing parental leave duties with their partner.
Here’s how it works: New moms and dads in Sweden are allowed to split fourteen months of parental leave between them. During this time, 80 percent of their salaries are paid by the government. If fathers don’t spend at least two months at home with the baby on their own, the couple forfeits those two months. Around 85 percent of Swedish fathers take this “daddy leave.” Some fathers even take on the entire parental leave, allowing their wives to go right back to working full-time after they have a child.
How does this compare to America? The Department of Labor supports paternity leave…in theory. “Paternity leave—and especially longer leaves of several weeks or months—can promote parent-child bonding, improve outcomes for children, and even increase gender equity at home and at the workplace. Empowering more dads with paid parental leave means they can achieve their professional goals and be supportive, nurturing fathers and partners,” the department explained in a policy briefing from 2015.
But in the States the burden of making sure that dads are still paid while on paternity leave falls on employers. The government really likes the idea but won’t pay a dime in support of it. And most companies remain stingy about any kind of parental leave. A 2012 Department of Labor study found that “only 13 percent of men who took parental leave received pay compared with 21 percent for women.”
The singer John Legend made headlines in 2016 when he announced he was taking paternity leave after the birth of his daughter Luna. It’s easier to afford paternity leave when you’re a multimillionaire performing artist or an employee of a fancy and progressive tech company like Facebook, Google, or Twitter, all of which offer some paid paternity leave. Most of our friends who took paternity leaves were unpaid, and even then they only took off a week or two tops. My friend Alice’s husband was posted overseas in Europe working for the State Department. He scheduled his vacation time around her due date. We had friends without paid vacation time who counted their blessings that their baby was born on a Friday so they would be able to be with their wife and new child for two days over the weekend.
It may be this lack of government and private-sector support that’s making couples with children less happy than couples without children.
Researchers recently looked at the happiness levels of parents versus nonparents in twenty-two countries. In places like Sweden, Norway, and Hungary, countries with more flexible work options, generous parental leave policies, and subsidies for day care, parents tended to be happier than nonparents.
Not so in the United States.
“The bad news is that of the 22 countries we studied, the U.S. has the largest happiness shortfall among parents compared to nonparents, significantly larger than the gap found in Great Britain and Australia,” wrote Jennifer Glass, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and coauthor of the study. “What we found was astonishing. The negative effects of parenthood on happiness were entirely explained by the presence or absence of social policies allowing parents to better combine paid work with family obligations. And this was true for both mothers and fathers.”
“I’m married to a modern man and not a dinosaur! Of course he took care of our baby after she was born,” Birgitta Ohlsson, a member of the Swedish parliament, told Nick and me over a coffee in Stockholm. “Gender equality is one of the cornerstones of Swedish society. It truly contributes to keeping happy families together.”
Nick and I met Birgitta over a fika in the Swedish parliament building in the Gamla Stan neighborhood of Stockholm, the small medieval heart of the city filled with tourists buying elk hides, lingonberry jams, and mugs in the shape of moose. Birgitta had invited us to meet her to chat about Sweden’s wonderful parental leave policies and why they helped contribute to stronger marriages. Before arriving at the Swedish parliament, I’d been picturing a severe and serious building filled with Viking legislators dressed in sharply cut suits. I thought we’d meet Birgitta in a dark wood–paneled office and shake hands formally. I wasn’t expecting this cheery coffee lounge with peach-colored carpet and an excellent flaky-pastry selection.
Fika, a wondrous invention, could be compared to teatime in England, except with coffee instead of tea and fikabröd, sweet Swedish pastries, instead of British wafers w
ith the consistency of cardboard. During our time in Sweden I’d grown partial to the chokladbiskvi, an almond biscuit topped with chocolate mousse and coated with crunchy chocolate, and the kardemummabulle, a rosette-shaped bun coated in butter, sugar, cinnamon, and cardamom. The Swedes take fika very seriously as a break from their workdays and will sometimes schedule at least two of them in a single day.
Birgitta Ohlsson’s schedule that day was harried, as a colleague had recently quit to become the ambassador to Jordan to help deal with the current refugee crisis, and we were lucky to get her for a single fika. I had wanted to meet her since I saw her quoted in the Times extolling the virtues of her country’s paid parental leave, saying: “Now men can have it all—a successful career and being a responsible daddy.” Birgitta has long been an advocate for both feminism and equality in Sweden, but she became a part of the paternity leave story when she was appointed to be Sweden’s new European Union minister while pregnant with her first child.
The Swedish media were upset that Birgitta might not take enough time off. She stood strong in her decision to accept the EU post and told the press that her husband, a law professor, could handle the new baby as well as she could.
Ohlsson was as cool and fierce as I’d expected her to be, but more casual and inviting than the American politicians I’d met face to face. But then, most American politicians would never invite a random foreigner to pop into the Senate for a latte and a pastry. She wore a vaguely sparkly top and sensible but chic black patent-leather flats. Before digging into the meat of Swedish policy, we meandered through the obligatory small talk about the horrors of the current American political season. Her observations about American politics were intensely astute in a way that made me embarrassed that I still wasn’t sure of the names of Sweden’s political parties. But she wasn’t critical of the American political system. She was kind when she explained that Sweden had also taken a long time to evolve toward government-supported equality.
“Among my parents’ generation it wasn’t common that fathers were home with their kids. It was an odd situation back then. Among my generation it’s almost standard that fathers are active in taking care of their children,” Ohlsson explained. “Bad parental leave policies mean that brilliant women tend to stay at home, which is bad for society. We can’t afford to have the best-educated housewives in the world.”
I cringed and thought about all of the highly educated women I knew back home in the States who had to drop out of the workforce because of the astronomical cost of child care, their companies’ poor parental leave policies, and the lack of opportunities for flexible work schedules.
Ohlsson continued. “When the men stay at home, they develop a special sense for their kids and they also become much more active in the household chores. It makes for a happier marriage. Look around Stockholm. It’s so normal here to see dads out and active with their kids.”
She nodded over toward the corner of the room, where a father was diligently tapping away at his laptop with one hand and rocking a baby carriage back and forth with the other.
Nick, always a business journalist keen for economic proof that a policy has been successful, leaned in toward Birgitta.
“But how do you know this works? Are there statistics that say footing the bill for parental leave pays off for society in some way down the road? How do you know it’s the right thing to do?”
She gave him a strange look before she replied matter-of-factly.
“It’s just better.”
It was true. Everywhere else we went in Stockholm we saw dads pushing the strollers. We saw them on the island of Djurgården when Nick agreed to visit the ABBA museum, an entire institution dedicated to the Swedish pop group that brought the world “Dancing Queen” and “Mamma Mia.” We saw them in the hair salons that dotted each and every block. There were more salons in Sweden than coffee shops. I assumed it was because everyone, men, women, and babies, was getting confusing yet flattering asymmetrical haircuts at least once a week. There was a daddy/baby carriage traffic jam in the chicest store in the chicest neighborhood in the city. Vogue had recently knighted Södermalm one of the “world’s coolest neighborhoods” and praised the store Grandpa as a top-notch boutique for both men’s and women’s clothes. It’s one of those stores where you know right away that everyone in it is more interesting than you are. Yet I could hardly move a few feet without running into a stroller containing an adorable Swedish baby pushed by a handsome dad wearing suspenders without irony, rad sneakers, and acid-washed jeans.
I was alone that afternoon. Nick had run off to a meeting, so I needed this gang of Swedish dads to help me decide which rad Swedish sneakers to purchase. They took the job quite seriously, lining the carriages up against a wall and paying close attention as I tried on one pair after another.
“Too boring,” they frowned to a simple black pair with an elevated platform bottom.
“Too flashy” to the sleek electric blue ones.
“Underbar!” they exclaimed, which means “wonderful, magnificent, and lovely” in Swedish, to a pair of kicks with an intricate basket-weave pattern and thick black soles.
The excitement woke the babies, and suddenly my supporters were busy with bottle preparation, funny-face making, and nappy changing.
In another shop I found a series of greeting cards to give to new moms and dads on the occasion of their parental leave. “Happy Mommy Leave,” read a card showing two women enjoying a coffee with a baby carriage in the background. “Happy Daddy Leave,” read another of a man with a similar carriage drinking a beer at a bar. A third card in the series just said “Swede,” with an illustration of a man and woman each holding one handle of a woman’s purse.
“The Swedish dads helped me pick out these sneakers,” I told Nick as I modeled them in our hotel room that night. I was pleased with myself for buying “sensible shoes.” He was stressed about finishing up an important presentation for work.
“Why do the Swedish dads shop for sneakers all the time?” he snapped.
“The store had shirts and pants too. They’re enjoying their daddy leave,” I said defensively.
“I don’t think parental leave is going to be all shopping and having fun,” he replied tersely.
“Neither do I.” I carefully packed my new sneakers and mommy-leave greeting cards into our suitcase.
Nick sighed and rubbed his temples. “I get nervous,” he said. “It is going to change everything. Having kids.” I don’t know why I wasn’t as scared as Nick. I probably should have been as scared as Nick. For some reason I had this intense, if maybe naive, faith that I had chosen the right partner to have kids with and that would make all the difference. Nick was the right partner. Everything was going to be OK. Right?
During our time in Sweden I kept thinking back to a conversation I’d had with Jessica Valenti, the founder of the blog Feministing and author of the best seller Sex Object. Jessica had been married for six years when I talked to her about my own search for a template for marital equality. She told me that she and her husband felt like they had to make it up as they went along, even more so after the birth of their first child.
“We did it by the seat of our pants,” Jessica told me. “But as feminist as you are, it is easy to fall into traditional gender roles. We both take care of the kid in equal numbers, but somehow only one of us is making doctors’ appointments or buying clothes. And we had to have a conversation about that. For us it’s about having a constant conversation and keeping that conversation open and being as proactive as possible.”
If you’re ever looking to dive deep into a rabbit hole of stay-at-home-Swedish-dad porn on a hungover or overcast Sunday afternoon, I highly recommend taking a look at photographer Johan Bävman’s photo book Swedish Dads.
When Johan, a freelance photographer, had his first son, he took advantage of the country’s leave policies and traded off staying at home with his wife, who also works full-time as a writer. Johan quickly felt isolated a
s a new parent, particularly as a new dad.
“All of a sudden I was responsible for another life, and I was lacking in role models. I needed to find other men that I could relate to as a new father, men like me,” Johan told Nick and me over lunch in his hometown of Malmö shortly after our dip in the sea. I’d been trying to interview Johan over Skype for months, but he was constantly on dad duty with a toddler and newborn at home. Calls were canceled to deal with sick babies, a wife heading out of town for work, and the general exhaustion from parenting two small humans.
“On TV you see these superdads who can do everything. They can make the perfect cupcakes and get all of the vacuuming done and put the baby to bed and the house looks wonderful and they seem like they don’t feel any stress or frustrations,” Johan continued. What the what? I thought. When was the last time you heard an American dad lamenting his inability to make the perfect cupcakes? On American TV we typically see plenty of supermoms, but the fathers are either the bumbling dad who puts the diaper in the garbage disposal or the cool dad who dons a BabyBjörn while drinking a sixer at his weekly poker game.
Johan continued: “I felt a lot of frustration. I was worried I wasn’t being a good parent. I needed to find other dads who I could relate to.”
So Johan plastered ads all over town looking for willing subjects. He’d even recruit other dads he met at the playground. The objective was to find out why the fathers elected to stay home with their kids, and how it changed their relationships with both their children and their partners.
“That’s why I’m writing this book,” I interrupted him. “I was worried I didn’t know how to be a good married person, and I needed to find other married people I could relate to.” Nick patted my leg to indicate I was being rude. “Sorry. Go on.”
